Aurelia Plath, Young Wife and Mother: 24 Prince Street, Jamaica Plain

Newlyweds Aurelia Schober and Otto Plath rented here the lower left unit from 1932 until 1936. This was where the couple rewrote for publication Otto's dissertation about bees. Here Aurelia studied Latin for a college course Otto had her take so she could better draft his paper about insects. Sylvia Plath was born in a Boston hospital, but this house in the Boston neighborhood called Jamaica Plain was her first home. In a little pink baby book Aurelia chronicled her daughter's growth and milestones. Sylvia spoke her first words at eight months old. At 14 months Aurelia noted that Sylvia said, "Daddy," "specially when someone shakes the furnace!" Back then, someone had to shake the house's furnace about every 12 hours to knock the ashes off the burning coals.

In this house Sylvia learned to walk, talk, and read. Little Sylvia, using tiles, here copied onto the living-room carpet an image of the Taj Mahal, artwork that delighted her father. Built in 1916, 24 Prince Street is a short walk from the Arnold Arboretum, a botanical garden and haven for bees, where Otto had dwelt for years with a houseful of fellow Harvard graduate students. Sylvia could recall from her very early childhood her grandparents' house in Winthrop, by the ocean, but only Aurelia recalled in writing some of the events that took place here.

Aurelia's Platinum Summer

In April 1954, Sylvia Plath mailed her mother Aurelia a birthday card picturing a witch. Back at Smith College after her breakdown, Sylvia, 21, was growing up and away, changing and thriving, and in case Mother didn’t get the message, she came home for the summer bleached blond and loaded for bear. 

“Kindnesses and loving acts were now viewed cynically, analyzed for underlying motives,” Aurelia wrote in Letters Home, using the passive voice to soften the truth: Sylvia had confronted her with a new, independent-from-her-mother personality. “One had to stand back and hope that neither she nor anyone else would be deeply hurt,” Aurelia wrote, but she was the one deeply hurt. (LH, 138)

The issue was Sylvia’s sex life. Aurelia worried that Sylvia might have sex. Parents of daughters still harp about that, but Aurelia got very ugly and grilled Sylvia about where she went and with whom. In mid-June Sylvia told her psychiatrist that Aurelia threatened to withdraw financial support unless Sylvia stayed a virgin. Sylvia, probably not a virgin even then, chose to tell her mother nothing rather than lie. Hearing about another mother-daughter argument on June 21, Sylvia’s psychiatrist advised her not to confuse defiance with true independence. [1]

That summer too Aurelia’s ulcer was bleeding, her mother had stomach cancer, her employer was closing the college she worked for, and she worried that Sylvia might try suicide again. Sylvia pleased Aurelia by accepting a suitor’s proposal but strung him along while having affairs with men she met at summer school. In an August 7 letter to her fiancé Gordon Lameyer, Sylvia claimed to have won her independence from her mother. What she had actually done was pick up a stranger and have a fling with him.

Back at Smith for her final year there, she wrote Aurelia as usual, at times sounding contrite, but avoided seeing her mother for the rest of the year while Aurelia’s ulcer raged out of control.

Known for smiling through her pain, Aurelia in summer 1954 gave in to self-pity showy enough that 20 years later Lameyer recalled that Aurelia would say to Sylvia, “you love ____, or you kiss ____, but you don’t like me.” [2] Aurelia was very bad at fishing for sympathy. In late 1954, feeling a bit better after a hospital stay, Aurelia told her woes to her sister Dorothy “Dotty” Benotti and her husband Joe. Devoutly Catholic Dotty told Aurelia that God was punishing her for leaving the Catholic church and her other sins.

Aurelia was so outraged she vomited blood. She wrote Sylvia that Dotty said something cutting which Sylvia’s return letter of January 29, 1955, does not specify. But Aurelia preserved what Dotty said in angry Gregg shorthand annotations in a book of Bible stories, in the margins alongside the story of Job:

And now upon the scene appeared a group of Job’s friends who said they came to be his comforters, but who turned into his tormentors because they kept on insisting that his afflictions must be a sign that he was very wicked, and that the first thing he needed to do was to repent. To the left of this passage, Aurelia penciled, in shorthand, “My sister Dorothy in 1954!”

As reinforcement, Aurelia wrote “1954” and circled it. She underlined nevertheless upon this good man all sorts of sorrow and bereavement descended, and next to it wrote “tell Dot!” [3]

Sylvia’s January 29 letter to her mother opened with six full paragraphs of consolation, saying Dotty was just jealous: of Aurelia’s children (Dotty’s were adopted), of Aurelia’s better looks despite her much harder life, and of driving lessons that were going badly but would lead to Aurelia’s greater independence. It is the lengthiest and most empathetic expression of sympathy Sylvia Plath ever sent her mother. She had indeed grown up, if just a little.

Aurelia had a long memory for slights but a longer one for kindnesses. On Sylvia’s comforting January letter she wrote in shorthand, “specially fine and kind to my bruised ego.” Dotty and Aurelia forgave each other, and Aurelia sped to her sister’s side in the 1970s when Dotty became terminally ill.

[1] Harriet Rosenstein’s undated taped interview with Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, Collection 1489, Emory University, Stuart A. Rose Library.

[2] Collection 1489, Box 2, folder 13, "Lameyer" p. 2.

[3] pages 359-360, Stories of the Bible (Abingdon Press, 1934), in the Sylvia Plath collection, Smith College. The book is inscribed “Love to Sylvia & Warren from their ‘other mother.’ Marion Freeman Christmas 1940”. The underlining of "sorrow and bereavement" and annotations on another Bible story in the book indicate that Aurelia wrote the annotations after Sylvia's death.

Aurelia Plath's Trips Abroad

Aurelia Plath traveled quite often, but only in later life. In 1956, she was 50 years old. In 1981, she was 75.

1981: Bermuda, May 18-25

1979: Antigua with Roberta Wood, April

1978: Antigua, with Roberta Wood

1973: England, Aug. 23-Sept. 5

1970: European Tour with Dot and Joe Benotti, June 4-30

1969: Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia with Marion Freeman, May 31-June 22

1967: England, July-August

1965: England, June 10-c. July 23

1964: England, June 10-July 1

1963: England, June 6-July 11

1962: England, June 21-August 4

1961: England, June 18-July 14

1958: Bermuda with Francis Schober, Sr. (father), arriving May 31

1956: England, France (eight days in Paris), Netherlands (five days in Amsterdam), Germany, Austria (three weeks), Switzerland (three weeks), England (nine days), June 13-August 14 [1]

1908: San Remo, Italy, with Aurelia Schober, Sr. (mother), according to Francis Schober's citizenship papers, and returning to the U.S. in May 1909, according to a ship's manifest. Aurelia was a toddler at the time and never mentioned this trip.

[1] Itinerary according to Aurelia's Christmas letter 1956 to Miriam Baggett (archive, Smith).

Otto Plath Was A Pacifist -- Not

The only known photo of Aurelia Plath with Otto, July 1933.

Sylvia’s Plath’s poem “Daddy,” written in 1962, implies that her Prussian immigrant father was a Nazi. He was not. But it is time to stop saying “Otto was a pacifist.” His widow Aurelia Plath promoted that view, idealizing her late husband before undercutting him by telling much more. Her preface to Letters Home (1975) says Otto Plath emigrated from Prussia to the U.S. to escape compulsory military service and told her he would never bear arms. As an entomologist Otto had such reverence for life that he grieved when he stepped on ants, and forbade his wife and children to kill any bugs except mosquitoes and houseflies. [1]

Thus defined, pacifism is principled opposition to war but also a way of life. Nothing in the record of Otto’s life demonstrates a principled commitment to peace or peacemaking. Millions of men have dreaded, and still dread, conscription and the hardships of army life. Otto’s Prussia drafted all men at age 20 for three years of service and five in the reserves. In Russia it was six years of service and nine in the reserves. You didn’t have to be a pacifist to hate this. Europeans in a great wave fled to the U.S. and Canada, Otto Plath in 1900, age 15. [2] Frenchman Emile Arnaud coined the word “pacifist” and it first appears in print in French and English in 1901. It means “peacemaker.”

When the FBI grilled German citizen Otto in 1918 as to his opinion of the war, he did not say he was a pacifist. Otto and Aurelia began dating in 1930 when he was 45, too old for military service, so any claims to pacifism then were for show. As a husband Otto made anything but peace. Aurelia testified to this at length in her preface to Letters Home and briefly in private letters. In public an estimable, even jovial professor, Otto at home was jealous, possessive, hectoring, and wrathful. He commandeered their household and forbade socializing. One year into their marriage, when “talking things out and reasoning” (Aurelia doesn’t admit to arguing) had failed, the formerly spirited young woman, a new mother, became submissive—because she wanted a peaceful home. (LH 13) Esther Greenwood, narrator of Sylvia’s novel The Bell Jar, says her mother learned she’d been baited-and-switched before her honeymoon began, “and from that day on my mother never had a minute’s peace.” (TBJ 69) 

Sylvia was four when they moved to a larger house. Otto the bug-lover was so volatile and irritable that when he was home Aurelia kept the children upstairs, confined and quiet. “Barely daring to breathe or whisper,” Sylvia wrote when drafting “Daddy”—and revised it to “barely daring to breathe or Achoo,” a word choice that plants the scene in her childhood.

In Letters Home Aurelia describes trying to pacify her Herr des Hauses. Aurelia had secret dinner guests, had her parents move into their 750-square-foot apartment for the first and second summers after her marriage: human shields. Letters Home reviewers did not recognize the marriage as abusive. Instead they jeered Aurelia as a "martyr," called Otto a “self-punishing” presence. [3] Aurelia made excuses: He was 21 years older than she, his mother had been terrible, his work was important, he had long lived alone, uncontrolled diabetes fueled his mood swings. But somehow Otto got tyrannical only at home. Not always, of course. Jekyll-and-Hyde types can be dear and loving when they choose, will even buy you a pearl necklace and fur (!) stole. But they will make you wear the fur on a July day just to show that you have it [pictured].

Sylvia Plath witnessed all this for her first eight years. Later she despised her mother for not standing up to and leaving the man Sylvia, never Aurelia, called an “ogre.” After Otto died Aurelia became a peace enforcer. Our “proofs” of Sylvia’s pacifism are mostly juvenilia created under the influence of her mother and peers (“Almost all my classmates are against all war,” [4]), such as her early poem “Bitter Strawberries,” and a self-portrait of schoolgirl Sylvia envisioning a battlefield and seeming to weep.  Adult Sylvia had opinions but never registered to vote and only watched for an hour a passing peace march in London in 1960.

When Sylvia in her journal remarks that Otto—waning in health and strength—“heiled Hitler in his own home,” it doesn’t mean he was a Nazi. Otto left Europe twenty years before the Nazi party existed. It means Otto was at that moment (at home) identifying with a dictator. Sylvia wrote in her story “Among the Bumblebees” about hearing through the walls, at night from her parents’ room, her father raising his voice “like thunder.” It wasn’t Sylvia he was yelling at. “Daddy”’s notorious “boot in the face” I hope is an invention. As of now, there is no record of physical assault in the Plaths’ marriage—only in Sylvia’s.

Sylvia identified with her father and came to revel in bullying first her brother Warren and then a Jewish neighbor boy, and she outdid her father in possessiveness. She chose to marry a “violent Adam,” policed his every move and jealously accused him. Letters Home excerpted her letter to Warren mentioning “every so often” marital fighting: sprained thumbs, missing earlobes. (LH, 344) Unlike her mother, Sylvia was not a submissive wife. She wrote in her journal: “I do not hit often. Once or twice.” Her unabridged journals (2000) gave startling details. [5] In 2018 some newly released Plath letters included her accusations of domestic violence. These were received by the press and by fans as if they were the first anyone had heard of violence in the marriage.

Sylvia’s parents had modeled for her a marriage so dysfunctional Sylvia expressed it in her art as the coupling of Nazi and Jew. “In the[ir] daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other,” she said, introducing the poem “Daddy” on a BBC program. The daughter “has to act out the awful little allegory once over until she is free of it.” The poem draws a parallel not only between the worst traits of Sylvia’s father and her husband, but between the worst traits of Sylvia’s parents’ marriage and her own.

[1] ASP to MSC, May 1, 1972.

[2] Escaping conscription was a common reason for emigration. Donald Trump's Bavarian grandfather fled to the U.S. in 1885, age 16. When he returned to Germany for a visit, the German Empire convicted him of evading military service.

[3] New York Times Book Review, December 14, 1975, page 1.

[4] The Letters of Sylvia Plath, volume 1, page 140.

[5] Journals, June 11, 1958.

N.B. Celebrated pacifists who privately abused their spouses, children, or students/followers include Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Robert Lowell, John Lennon, and John Howard Yoder.

Leaving 26 Elmwood Road

In 1983, six years after selling Sylvia’s letters and juvenilia, Aurelia Plath at 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley still had “oceans of papers, out-of-print magazines, clippings of reviews, letters”; “dozens of boxes of family pictures; my notebooks (travel, journals)”; “four three-drawer filing cabinets, three desks, an eight-drawer bureau of papers.” While paging through these, she uncovered yet more. [1]

Age 77, after 40 years in that house Aurelia had to sell it and move to an apartment. She wanted the papers by and about Sylvia to go to the Sylvia Plath archive at Smith College’s library—donated, to get a tax break. Yet the prospect of sorting them was overwhelming.

That summer she told this to Wellesley neighbor and friend Dr. Richard Larschan, who volunteered his help. I asked Dr. Larschan where in the house Aurelia had kept all the papers and memorabilia so vital to Plath studies now.

“I only know that when we were sorting, Aurelia kept it in two walk-in closets in the room where her parents had slept,” he remembered. Self-described “pack rat” Aurelia “kept everything she touched in meticulous order—hundreds of letters neatly organized according to correspondent, and tied with ribbons.”

A U-Mass. professor of English (now Emeritus), Larschan was the right helper for sifting the goods systematically. He said they met “thrice-weekly [for] two- or three-hour sessions, during which Aurelia and I would evaluate the accumulation of 60-plus years, including things from Sylvia’s childhood like the letter opener she had carved, Sylvia’s Girl Scout uniform, Otto’s doctoral certificate, multiple copies of every newspaper clipping and magazine article Sylvia ever published, hundreds and hundreds of letters from readers of Letters Home, et cetera. I would type a list of things Aurelia would either discard, give to me, or donate to Smith and Indiana University after being evaluated by a rare-book expert.”

This task drained Aurelia emotionally. She wrote a friend, “Have to part with most reminders of my past—it hurts, as you know. (Eyestrain slows me down.)” Not only did her eyes hurt, but “Discarding thousands of pages of correspondence tugs at the heart. So many good people have given of themselves!” She means they threw away the fan letters. On the good side, Larschan and Aurelia developed a bond. Like Sylvia, he had had been a Fulbright fellow. At Exeter University in 1962-63 he had lived only fifteen miles from Ted and Sylvia’s Court Green, although they never met. Larschan admired Aurelia’s independence (“a burden to nobody”) while acknowledging her sometimes cloying sentimentality, rather like his own mother’s.

Sentimentality is of course repellent, but the next time you marvel over the rich resources in Plath archives, thank Sylvia’s sentimental mother.

Smith College received the donation in December 1983. Still, not every notable piece of paper went there. “In 1984,” Larschan said, “Aurelia gave me her correspondence with Olwyn Hughes about publishing (or NOT publishing!) The Bell Jar, which I sold to Smith College. She also gave me duplicate copies of Sylvia’s various publications that I sold privately and are now housed at Emory—along with [Sylvia’s] downstairs neighbor Trevor Thomas’s [self-published memoir] Last Encounters, inscribed to me when I lived in England."

Also withheld from the archives were Aurelia's own notebooks and journals, and photos of family members besides Otto or Sylvia: maybe of sister Dottie or son Warren, and so on. Asked if he saw any packets of Aurelia’s letters to Sylvia, Larschan said he did not.

So the task was completed. “When we were through cataloging and evaluating the materials Aurelia donated to Smith, in 1984 [Smith College] President Jill Ker Conway invited Aurelia and me for lunch, and so I drove us to Northampton,” Larschan said. [2] That lunch was their thank-you.

 

[1] ASP to Mary Ann Montgomery, letters of April 1980 and September 6, 1983, Lilly. ASP to Rose Leiman Goldemberg, postcards June and October 1983, Rose Goldemberg Papers, *T-Mss 2016-003, box 8, folder 1, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

[2] Emails, Richard Larschan to the author, December 2 and 4, 2021.

Before Sylvia Was Famous: A Review From 1962

Sylvia Plath's first collection of poems, The Colossus, was published in England in 1960 and in the U.S. in May 1962. The Oakland [California] Tribune ran this review on July 29, 1962. I thought it was a refreshing read, without all the biographical baggage Plath's poems carry today.

Book-review editors get literally tons of new books and can review in print only a select few. The reviewer, Jack Anderson (b. 1935) had the good taste to review The Colossus. In 1959 he had quit UC-Berkeley to work for the Oakland Tribune. Anderson became a New York Times dance critic and a pioneering dance historian as well as a poet.

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Sylvia Plath's Sacred Baboon

Here's the "sacred baboon" Sylvia Plath found on the beach in Winthrop when she was two and a half years old, and described in her memoir "Ocean 1212-W":

According to "Ocean 1212-W," Sylvia found this "simian Thinker" washed up on the seashore the day her brother was born. She was jealous because she would no longer be her parents' only child. But finding the baboon sculpture on the beach that day was a sign that she was special.

The fact is that Sylvia did not find this sculpture. Her neighbor and playmate David Freeman found it, he said, between the ages of 8 and 14 (before 1946). It had drifted in covered with tar. David's father "figured it belonged to some sailor" and cleaned it. [1] The photograph is courtesy of David's sister Ruth Freeman, via Dr. Richard Larschan.

The ancient Egyptians honored Hamadryas baboons as one of the incarnations of their god of wisdom.  They portrayed these sacred baboons in art and made mummies of them. This particular sculpture was more recent, a remnant of a then-new Western fascination with hominid intelligence and behavior. In the 1920s, U.S. psychobiologist Robert Yerkes adopted chimpanzees, published a book about them titled Almost Human, and founded the first primatology laboratory, at Yale (it's now at Emory). Popular interest, plus the influence of Egyptian art on modern sculpture, culminated in the Baboon Fountain featured at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The photo below shows two of the fountain's five godlike baboon figures, with the fair's iconic Pylon in the background.

[1] Harriet Rosenstein's notes from her interview with David Freeman on 17 July 1974, Emory.